News from the Left

After twenty years of wearing a swastika tattoo on his chest, Michael Kent began the process of covering the symbol after forming an unlikely friendship with his African-American parole officer Tiffany Whittier.

The Cowboys stood and linked arms during the national anthem as other teams, including the Pittsburgh Steelers, and players, like Denver Broncos star Von Miller, experience fallout from their reactions to President Trump's comments on the NFL.

"The FEMA people are great - they're good people. They want to help," San Juan, Puerto Rico, Mayor Carmen YulÃ­n Cruz told ABC News. "But the chain of command needs to work a little faster for the people."

After twenty years of wearing a swastika tattoo on his chest, Michael Kent began the process of covering the symbol after forming an unlikely friendship with his African-American parole officer Tiffany Whittier.

The Cowboys stood and linked arms during the national anthem as other teams, including the Pittsburgh Steelers, and players, like Denver Broncos star Von Miller, experience fallout from their reactions to President Trump's comments on the NFL.

"The FEMA people are great - they're good people. They want to help," San Juan, Puerto Rico, Mayor Carmen YulÃ­n Cruz told ABC News. "But the chain of command needs to work a little faster for the people."

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) announced Tuesday he will not seek reelection this year, another blow to the Republican establishment wing that comes on the same day the latest Republican effort to revamp t...

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THIS IS DEFINITELY NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME

The NY Times did its best to undermine the credibility of President Trump during Inauguration Week. This story (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/trump-russia-associates-investigation.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=1)threw further fuel on the anti-Trump fire (literally and figuratively)with lots of hype, yet admitted after its yellow journalistic headline and lead that "It is not clear whether the intercepted communications [to an ally of Trump's] had anything to do with Mr. Trump’s campaign, or Mr. Trump himself. It is also unclear whether the inquiry has anything to do with an investigation into the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computers and other attempts to disrupt the elections in November." In other words, the Times was willing to cause further havoc and damage to America with this story, based on anonymous sources who have actually provided them almost no information of value, and spread it across social media on Inauguration Day to flame the fires of hate. This information is soooo weak compared with the massive evidence against Hillary and the Clinton Foundation. The NYT should be ashamed of itself. If they had invested half of this effort investigating and writing about Hillary, she would be in prison by now. They scoffed at much more valid information, closer relationships, and direct influences on her and choose to hype this story with this much lack of information. What an irresponsible, journalistic joke.

TIMES PUBLISHES ONE-SIDED STORIES ON TRUMP NOMINEES

The NYT story at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/steven-mnuchin-treasury-secretary-nominee-assets-confirmation.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur is nearly 100% based on anti-Trump sources with minimal opportunity for their victim to defend himself or for any congressional supporter to defend him. When, after many paragraphs, it gets to the specifics of the headlined $100 million in "hidden" assets, it turns out that most of that is the nominee's ownership of two very expensive homes. How sinister! What would be his motivation for lying about his two homes, which investigators would discover in about 2 seconds? To ascribe that to a desire to deceive Congress makes far less sense than his downplayed 1-sentence explanation that he did not interpret the question properly.

GREAT EXAMPLE OF BIASED REPORTING BY NBC

Other mainstream media have similarly played fast and loose with long-forgotten journalist ethics. This story by NBC News at http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/betsy-devos-trump-s-pick-education-secretary-won-t-rule-n708171?cid=sm_fb_nbcnews shows exactly why conservatives don't like or trust the mainstream media. What this video shows:

1) I don't believe one Republican's question was in the video -- only Democrats'.

2) The questions were loaded to embarrass the nominee, and she was not given the opportunity to explain her answers.

3) The story's lead and headline demonstrate a lack of understanding of how public schools are operated and why Republicans might even decided to do away with the entire Department of Education. Schools are typically operated by local governments, funded mostly with local and state tax revenues. Neither the Secretary of Education nor anyone in the federal government has the right and power to "privatize" or to defund schools. The most they can do is eliminate federal funding AND federal mandates and return these to the local and state governments, which has been the case for most of the American history. Indeed, any reasonable interpretation of the Founding Fathers' discussion and intention for how the American government should operate would agree that they did NOT intend for the federal government to be involved in education. The Tenth Amendment forbidding it, by word and spirit, declared that the federal government should keep out of all aspects of governance that were not specifically covered in the Constitution, which were very limited.

4) How many nominated officials by both Democrat and Republican presidents have NOT also been donors to their respective parties? The fact that her wealthy family may have, collectively, donated $200 million to promote various GOP candidates and issues is no more relevant than if a Democrat nominee had donated $10,000 and worked hard to get his candidate elected. Occasionally but rarely a president will nominate a non-supporter, but those would be far easier to count than all the nominees of previous presidents who HAVE been significant donors in money and effort.

5) Has she every run an organization with a trillion- or billion-dollar budget? How many nominees in the past have? Probably very few. Have your children ever had to get a college loan? Now we're getting silly. The Secretary of Education or any of the cabinet members will come into office with thousands of career experts already in place to run their respective programs. A nominee is chosen to bring in certain perspective, ideas and general leadership -- not do the accounting. But let's be frank, the reason she was selected by Trump was not her money or her administrative expertise. She was selected to take a very skeptical look at the role of the federal government in education. She believes, for example, that parents who choose to take their children out of public schools and put them in private schools should have the right to take at least some of their tax money with them through a voucher program. I agree. My perspective relates to freedom of speech. What good is freedom of speech if you have no power to choose what you hear? If parents believe their children are not being taught properly, they should have the right to change their education. But if the government has already taken thousands of dollars of your tax money to fund your child's public education and won't let you have any back for private education, most parents won't be able to afford it. 6) Many of the Democrats' questions assume that it is the right and responsibility of the federal government to force its version of public education on all children. That was not at all the basis for the Constitution. I don't believe a single one of the Founding Fathers would have supported that notion, and there is plenty of evidence to support this view. When George W. Bush's secretary of state, Rod Paige, took office, he had the DOE review all the educational statistics they could accumulate and did an analysis with this simple question: Has federal funding done any good? Their conclusion was that there was no statistical evidence that the billions of federal dollars spent on education had ever made any significant difference. Based on that analysis, the No Child Left Behind Act was passed. I was a contractor with the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction during most of that time and got a bird's eye view of how the federal government tried to impose its will and its standards on local schools -- greatly resisted by state and local Democrats who felt it was excessive federal intervention. But even in their questions, the Democrats demonstrated that they want the federal government to impose its will on the local schools, relating to treatment of sexual orientation, guns, etc. It is just a question of who they want in control and whose values will be imposed on local schools. The easiest answer is to follow the spirit and letter of the Constitution. And the conclusion by Ms. DeVos might very well be to propose a termination of the entire department and return the controls and responsibilities back to the state and local governments. Cut the federal funding, but also cut the taxes taken to do the funding. The federal government has no funds that did not originally come from the citizens (or have to be paid back by the citizens, in the case of the $20 trillion in national debt).

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News from the Right

President Trump late Monday tweeted once again his support for Sen. Luther Strange in the hotly contested Alabama Republican runoff for U.S. Senate, a race that's pitted Trump against his former strategist, Steve Bannon.

Anti-Trump activists sent an open letter to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch asking him not to speak at President Trump's Washington, D.C., hotel on Thursday, saying it would present a conflict of interest and questions of his judicial independence.

Justice Gorsuch, who Mr. Trump nominated to the high court earlier ...

DENVER (AP) - The United States and Mexico have agreed to renew and expand a far-reaching conservation agreement that governs how they manage the overused Colorado River, which supplies water to millions of people and farms in both nations.

Sir James Dyson is renowned for his eponymous vacuum cleaners, but the British inventor hopes to clean up on the auto showroom floor come 2020, with his company's debut of an electric car, the BBC reported Tuesday.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley urged South Sudan's leaders on Tuesday to seize "the last chance" to salvage the 2015 peace agreement and end the worsening violence that has forced 4 million people to flee their homes and left 7.6 million in desperate need of aid.

Alternative views

Dozens of people, including supporters and two sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, rode ATVs and motorcycles into a protected Utah canyon on Saturday in defiance of federal rules governing the use of Western lands.
The illicit motorcade into Recapture Canyon, in Utah's...

It remains to be seen if Rep. Trey Gowdy, the chairman of the House select committee chosen to investigate the Benghazi attack, will have access to all the information that he needs, says Pete Hoekstra, former House Intelligence Committee chairman.

Republicans and conservative groups applauded the decision on Friday by House Speaker John Boehner to schedule a vote next week to create a select committee to investigate the 2012 Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Monday that there was no sign of an imminent invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces, despite a massive deployment along the border of the two countries. We do not have for the moment any sign indicating that there is an...

Ice is melting in the western Antarctic at an unstoppable pace, scientists said Monday, warning that the discovery holds major consequences for global sea level rise in the coming decades.The speedy melting means that prior calculations of sea level rise worldwide made by...

SpaceX, the rocket-maker owned by billionaire industrialist Elon Musk, is suing the Air Force to open its satellite launch program to competitive bidding and terminate the monopoly held by another company, National Public Radio reported.

A self-healing plastic that mimics blood clotting and can patch a hole more than 100 times larger than any previously engineered plastic was developed recently by researchers at the University of Illinois.

Winds in the wild Southern Ocean are blowing at their strongest in a millennia as climate change shifts weather patterns, leaving Antarctica colder and Australia facing more droughts, a study showed Monday.Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were strengthening...